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  After the flight reached cruising altitude, the flight attendants came around with drinks. When the flight attendant passed him the requested Coke, she did a double take, but continued on, apparently dismissing the idea that Michael O’Neal would be on her plane. Afterwards, however, as the plane was just beginning its descent into Washington National, she came forward and did the approved stewardess squat by Mike’s seat.

  “Excuse, me, sir. I was wondering something…” she said, diffidently.

  “And that was?” Mike had cycled into a foul mood. Although the company was in good shape for an ORS and IG he wanted to be there to smooth out any wrinkles that might come up. He wanted the company to do as well on the inspections as they did in their readiness test. Although he respected Nightingale’s organizational abilities, he was worried about how she would manage the “problem children” in the company, even with Gunny Pappas riding herd. In that kind of mood, he didn’t give anyone any slack, much less a stewardess who just wanted to rub elbows with notoriety.

  It was the very reason his tunic, against regulation, was totally unadorned with ribbons. He was wearing a Combat Infantryman’s Badge, with one star, indicating that he had been in two major conflicts, and a pin that was still so unusual as to be nearly unrecognizable: a half starburst. The pin had been developed by Fleet to recognize persons who had been in the path of a nuclear blast. Despite the fact that it was authorized to both Fleet and Terran personnel, there were not many people vertical who wore them.

  “Are you the Michael O’Neal that was on Diess, the one who got the Medal of Honor?” she asked quietly.

  “Yes,” Mike snapped. “Next question.”

  “No question,” she said with an honest smile. “I just wanted to thank you. My brother is in the Seventh Cavalry. He made it back to the Dantren Perimeter, but he never would have made it out without your platoon arriving when it did. Thank you.”

  Well, that was an entirely different matter. “Damn, I’m glad to hear that! You know, the armored forces hardly ever get any mention in all the fuss. They stacked the damn Posleen up like cordwood even before we got there and nobody ever gives them any credit. How’s he doing? I admit I haven’t kept up with the units on Diess.”

  “They returned his division to the States. He’s down with the Texas Guard units, getting ready for The Day.”

  “Well, when you talk to him, wish him well from me,” Mike said with a smile.

  “Okay, I’ll do that. He’ll be happy I stopped.”

  “Good luck yourself.”

  “Well, we’re from Missouri. From what they’re saying on the news, we should be hit lightly. I hope so, but I’m sorry for all the people on the coasts.”

  “Yeah, most of my people are in the coastal plains. But no place is going to be completely safe, so get yourself a weapon. If they’re swarming, you might not even be able to take one with you,” he said bluntly. “But if they’ve been whittled down, it might save your life. I recommend a twelve-gauge riot gun. They’ve got a kick like a mule, but it’s hard to miss with a shotgun at close range and double-ought will take down a Posleen just fine. You may be in the safest spot there is and have the bad luck of a globe landing on you. So get a weapon.”

  “Okay, I will. Thanks again.”

  “Take care.”

  As the stewardess walked away, the Fleet captain looked up from her papers.

  “I thought it was you, but I wasn’t going to be impolite and ask,” she said with a strong English accent. Mike, who had a fair ear for accents and had spent time with the British while developing the ACS program, placed it as Midlands.

  “Yeah, well, I’m me, ma’am. I’ve never been anything else.”

  “You’re going to Washington?”

  “Yes, ma’am, apparently General Taylor wants some advice on how to run the war.”

  “Well, I can’t think of a better source for Combat Suit advice. Might I ask you what is causing you to be so caustic, young man?”

  Mike let out a sigh, much of his formless anger blowing out with it. The problems he was dealing with weren’t the captain’s fault. Nor was his own lack of confidence. “Well, Captain, my company is going through an Operational Readiness Inspection and an inspection by the Inspector General’s office at the moment and I would much rather be there than giving dog and pony shows in D.C. I gave a bunch of them last year and nobody gave a shit, pardon my French, so I don’t know that it’ll be any different this time.”

  “So you’re really going to be telling General Taylor how to run the war?” she said with a chuckle.

  “I suspect I might be, ma’am, at least from an ACS standpoint. The CONARC commander and I have a long-term acquaintance. The orders came from CONARC at Fort Myer, but I’m supposed to report directly to the Pentagon. Go figure.”

  “I think you should be happy about a chance for input,” she said, puzzled.

  “Well, ma’am, the other problem is the difference between tactical and strategic. Although I will admit to being one of the experts at tactical employment of ACS, I won’t bet dollars to donuts about strategic employment.”

  “Just remember,” she said, “ ‘an Army travels on its stomach.’ Strategic and operational art are better than eighty percent logistics. Approach it from a logistical standpoint and you’ll have them eating out of your hands.”

  “Logistics.”

  “Logistics.”

  “Okay, thanks, ma’am,” he said with a smile.

  “Don’t mention it.” She laughed.

  “Captain Michael O’Neal,” said Mike holding out his hand, “Fleet Strike.”

  “Captain April Weston,” said the gray-haired battleaxe, “Fleet Line. Command.” The period was easy to hear.

  “Oh, you have a ship?” asked Mike, interested. Very few of the ships being built for the defense were on-line or would be before the first few waves of the invasion. It was what would make the coming years such a difficult prospect.

  “If you can call it that,” she said, with a sour grimace. “It’s a converted Galactic frigate.”

  “Ouch,” said Mike, with a grimace of his own. “I saw the specs when I was at GalTech. No armor…”

  “Light weapons…”

  “No redundant systems…”

  “Limited targeting ability…”

  “Well,” said Mike, with another grimace, “at least you’ll have Combat Environment space suits.”

  “Great,” she said with a snort. “I spend a career fighting my way up through bloody-mindedness and knowledge of the sea, and now I have to learn to breathe vacuum.”

  “You’re a regular?” Mike said, surprised.

  “Actually, I was Royal Navy reserve until I made captain when they finally succumbed to the bloody inevitable and switched me to regular. My last command was the Sea Sprite, which, for your general fund of knowledge, is a cruiser. Now I’m off to the boundless depths of space and classes in astrogation. At my age,” she concluded, throwing up her hands.

  “Well,” Mike smiled, “good luck.”

  “Yes, we’ll all need it.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Washington, DC, United States of America, Sol III

  2317 EDT September 5th, 2004 ad

  The Sons of Mary seldom bother,

  for they have inherited that good part;

  But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother

  of the careful soul and the troubled heart.

  And because she lost her temper once,

  and because she was rude to the Lord her Guest,

  Her Sons must wait on Mary’s Sons,

  world without end, reprieve or rest.

  — “The Sons of Martha”

  Rudyard Kipling, 1907

  Except for the profusion of uniforms, the nation’s capital was virtually unchanged. Mike had taken the shuttle bus from Washington National and it went all over town before heading to the relatively nearby Pentagon. He caught brief glimpses of the Mall, and the streets of Georgetown were surpri
singly crowded with partyers. Mike finally saw males out of uniform, persons with jobs so vital that they could not be spared as cannon fodder for the war effort. From their suits, age and haircuts, they were mostly attorneys or congressional aides. Probably for the best, thought Mike. God knows what they would be like in uniform.

  In the previous year, while on tour after the Diess victories, Mike had had his fill of politicians, political aides, political military officers and everything else spin-related. Diess had given him such a clear and uncompromising view of the coming storm that he sometimes felt like the one-eyed man in the country of the blind. There had also been much more exposure to the upper echelons of the military than he had been used to and it had not been a successful exposure.

  Mike’s idea of subtle was to not tell the person, word for word, that they could not find their ass with both hands. Nonetheless the message came across. When a lieutenant, as he had been then, even a lieutenant with The Medal, takes an attitude like that towards officers thirty or more years his senior the lieutenant comes out of the contest the loser.

  The problem, from O’Neal’s point of view, was that although many of the senior military officers he had met were quite prepared for and capable of, even brilliant at, fighting humans, they still could not get their minds around the Posleen. Despite the ongoing stalemate on Barwhon and the horrendous daily losses it inflicted, they insisted on thinking of the Posleen as simply suicidal humans, something like the Japanese in World War II. And the numbers were not real to them. They thought in terms of weapons systems, tanks and armored personnel carriers, then troops, because waves of humans simply could not stand up to a modern army.

  But the Posleen not only boasted incredible masses of troops so fanatical they would happily take any ordered loss to achieve any ordered objective, they also had weapons capable of negating the utility of tanks and armored personnel carriers. Although the weapons of the normal Posleen were unaimed, fired “from the hip” without careful sighting, many Posleen carried heavy railguns, capable of penetrating side armor on an M-1 tank, or hypervelocity missile launchers capable of penetrating frontal armor. And the God King leader caste carried either automatic HVMs, laser cannons or plasma cannons. A plasma cannon, even if it struck a modern tank with a glancing blow, raised the interior temperature so high it cooked the crew to death.

  But all that senior officers heard was “wave charges” and “unaimed weaponry” and they assumed it would be like fighting Napoleonic-era human troops. It might even have been true were it not for the God Kings and their systems. It seemed to those senior commanders as if a modern, well-trained and equipped force should be able to slaughter them.

  On that point Michael agreed; the Posleen were going to be slaughtered. What he could not get across to the senior leadership was that the Posleen couldn’t care less how many they lost. They came in such masses that reducing their numbers by ninety percent often left them still outnumbering defenders, and with superior weaponry. Well, the powers-that-be would discover the error of their ways soon enough. Unfortunately Mike expected blood baths aplenty in the near future.

  The bus finally pulled up to the side entrance of the Pentagon, disgorged a mass of uniformed personnel and prepared to take on another mass headed back to the airport. Mike stared at the busy, scurrying officers, so intent on superior performance of their little niches, and wondered what they all did. What in the world were thirty captains, majors and colonels, most of whom wore the Military District of Washington shoulder patch, doing flying out to distant places at ten o’clock at night?

  “Their contribution to the war effort, I guess,” he muttered as he stomped wearily over to the MP-guarded entrance. His day had begun at 3 a.m. and had included a prepared attack, a hasty defense and a prepared defense. He had fought three virtual “murthering great battles” and it was, in his opinion, getting nigh on to bedtime.

  “Can I help you, Captain?” asked the MP lieutenant in an oddly supercilious tone, as he stepped in Mike’s way. Mike recognized the symptoms. Many Army and Navy personnel resented the whole concept of Fleet Strike, effectively American units being put under a broader command, some of them removed from America and not directly defending it. And the difference in pay scale did not help matters.

  Since Fleet and Fleet Strike were paid by the Federation, as opposed to Terran governments, they were paid in Federation credits. The Federation had a fixed payment scale for every level of worker throughout the Federation and the soldiers and spacemen of Fleet and Fleet Strike were given positions in that hierarchy.

  Through one of those quirks of Federation law that was so beneficial to humans, military personnel had an automatically advanced caste position. Federation law legitimized differing legal structures for differing societal rank; what was illegal for a lower-rank Galactic might be legal for a higher-rank Galactic.

  Since the Galactics did not recognize the difference between the legality of things civilian and military, most military activities, such as terminating sentient life, required special permissions. These, in turn, required a higher “caste.” That being the case, the lowest ranked soldier or spaceman was ranked the same as an Indowy junior master craftsman. The higher ranks were thus extremely advanced in the overall Galactic hierarchy.

  Given these advanced ranks, the Galactic pay scales were equivalent. A Fleet Strike captain made as much as a junior Darhel coordinator-nearly as much as an Army major general. On the other hand, with the tax increases for the war he was being taxed at almost eighty-seven percent of his income. It was a reasonable contribution to the war fund by anyone’s estimation. Mike had also heard something about a Federation-mandated bonus from the Diess action. That would further add to the disparity in pay scales. Whatever the case there was extreme prejudice over the pay structure.

  It was an attitude that would slowly dissipate after the war, if anyone survived, as Army units were subsumed into Fleet Strike. In the meantime it was just another hassle to be shrugged off.

  “Yes, you can, Lieutenant. You can check me in. I’m supposed to report to CONARC.”

  “I’m sorry, Captain, you seem to be in the wrong place. CONARC is based at Fort Myer. There will be a shuttle in about forty-five minutes.”

  Mike handed over his copy of the e-mail and fingered the AID wrapped around his wrist. “As you can see, the orders clearly state to report to the CONARC commander at the Pentagon, not Fort Myer. So, where am I supposed to go?”

  “I don’t know, Captain, I’m just the gatekeeper. But these aren’t authority for Pentagon entry.” He did not seem a bit displeased by the problem. “And in case no one ever explained this sort of thing to you, when it says report to the commander, it actually means report to someone at the command who will report you as arrived.” The lieutenant proffered another smug smile, having to explain such a simple item to one of the lords of the Fleet.

  Mike fingered the AID for a moment. “Would you care to try to find out?”

  “I wouldn’t know where to start, Captain. I suppose you could call CONARC,” he finished, pointing to a rank of pay phones outside the entrance.

  “Okee-dokee.” Mike slipped the AID off his wrist and set it on his head. It automatically conformed into a headset/microphone array. “Shelly, get Jack, please.”

  “Yes, sir,” the AID chirped. There was a brief pause, then, “General Horner on the line.”

  “Mike?” came the clipped tones.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where are you?” asked General Horner.

  “At the side entrance.”

  “Tell the MP to clear you through to the High Commander’s office, ASAP.”

  “Yes, sir.” He looked at the MP. “Okay, Lieutenant, the Continental Army Commander say, go to dee High Commander’s office, ASAP. Whadda you say?”

  “I have to have an authorized clearance to permit you entry to the building, sir,” said the MP, obviously calling the snotty Fleet jerk’s bluff.

  “Jack, he says he has
to have clearance.”

  When Mike used the Continental Army Commander’s first name, without being rebuked, the MP’s face turned as white as milk. It was obviously not a bluff.

  “Give him the phone,” General Horner said, icily.

  Mike handed over the AID, which the MP accepted gingerly, and watched as the lieutenant basically melted into the concrete. After three “yes, sirs” and a “no, sir” he handed the AID back and waved over one of the guards.

  “Sergeant Wilson, take the captain directly to the High Commander’s office,” he said quietly.

  “Have a nice day.” Mike waved airily as he snapped the shiny, black AID back around his wrist.

  “Yes, sir.”

  REMF, thought Mike.

  * * *

  Although Shelly could have led him through the labyrinth to the HC’s office, Mike was just as glad to have the sergeant along. The slightly smiling noncom led him first to a secondary guard room to get him a temporary pass, which was, miraculously, already cleared for him, then to the area formerly dedicated to the Joint Chiefs.

  They walked in through the clerks, still hard at work, and up to the desk of the final keeper of the portal, an aged black warrant officer who looked like he ate nails for breakfast. Mike had heard of Warrant Officer Kidd, an SF legend who apparently had decided that General Taylor needed a keeper at all times. He and the general went way back, so it was said, to an unlikely incident involving an annoyed alligator and two bottles of Jack Daniels. The sergeant stopped at the final keeper and saluted. “Chief Kidd, Sergeant Wilson reporting with Captain Michael O’Neal, who is here to see the High Commander.”

  Warrant Office Fourth Class Kidd returned the salute. “Thank you, Sergeant. Return to your post.”